San Francisco Police Department Crime Lab is slowly dying. The staff size has been reduced by 50% in the same time period that it was supposed to increase by 100%.
While the city is saving money on staff salary, it’s still paying for forensic services through outsourcing.
Ten months after the San Francisco Police Department promised to address its crime lab backlog by hiring more DNA analysts, the lab is more short-staffed than ever.
Lt. Troy Dangerfield says the crime lab would be fully staffed with 11 technicians. It currently employs just four, a spokesman said.
Meanwhile, San Francisco spends $150,000 every month sending criminal evidence to an outside lab because it lacks the in-house capacity to test it, according to spokesman Albie Esparza.
Last year, the crime lab’s DNA analysis operation was the object of scrutiny from city supervisors and police commissioners after at least two cases emerged in which suspects committed violent crimes while their DNA awaited testing for other crimes. In one case, the crime lab failed for years to test the DNA evidence in the homicide of a transgendered woman, while the suspect continued to rape and brutalize other transgendered women. The DNA lab has at times had a backlog of more than 500 cases.
After this and other high-profile cases, the Police Department found money to outsource its DNA backlog, which at that time topped 375 cases. In June, the department promised to hire new DNA analysts so the cases could be brought back in house.
But in the meantime, a staff that numbered six technicians a year ago has been pared to just four, and the department has neither replaced the lost technicians nor hired more. A department spokesman said the four technicians each have a caseload of about 20 cases, which police have described as “considerably above industry standards.”
Esparza said two technicians are on the verge of being hired, and The City’s Department of Human Resources has agreed to allow it to hire more. Dangerfield said it would take 11 analysts to fully staff the lab.
There is no longer a backlog, because every case has either been turned over to an outside lab or assigned to one of the four local technicians. Police say that about 30 cases a month are being turned over to a private lab in Richmond, at a cost of about $1.8 million a year.
However, it’s unclear how quickly samples are actually being tested. High-priority cases can be turned around as quickly as three days, but police say they do not know how long cases deemed low priority are left at the bottom of the list. Dangerfield said the
Police Department does not track such information.
“I’m not saying it’s not important,” Dangerfield said. “I’m just saying they don’t track that.”
Perhaps they should track such data? If they need a forensic software package that can help them track such information, they should contact me!
Read the rest of the article on The San Francisco Examiner.com.
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